Over the years Sport Relief has created many special charity moments, like John Bishop's week of hell, David Walliams' epic swims and Helen Skelton's south pole challenge. Together translating into over £175m raised for UK charities since 2002.

From a technology perspective, these huge one-off events present a real challenge. How do you create an IT infrastructure that is able to cope with such a massive volume of traffic in a short space of time? Not only that, how do you do it cost effectively and, most importantly, making sure everyone who wants to make a donation is able to?

Thankfully the answer to this challenge lies in cloud computing.

Rather than having a room full of servers that go unused for over 300 days of the year, cloud computing offers the opportunity to scale-up capacity when you need it.

We've been working with Comic Relief, for Red Nose Day and Sport Relief, since 2008 and have created one of the first cloud-based charity donation platforms.

This approach means that Sport Relief doesn't have to run physical infrastructure all year round, but can scale up by a factor of around 400 times in the peak period.

There's also a strong green benefit to cloud computing, since there aren't rooms full of energy hungry servers running all year around.

It's still relatively early days in the world of cloud computing. As it becomes more established in the commercial, public and charity sectors, companies will build more and more applications designed for the cloud. This means that the true benefits of cloud computing will become apparent as the applications become portable.

The charity sector is poised to respond to some major changes to the way people donate. According to the government's Giving Green Paper, despite the fact that some £10.6bn is raised annually, only 7% of the population donates online (compared to 58% of the population which shops online).

Most people in the charity sector agree that this will change. For example, the growth of mobile donations will drive spontaneous delivery, while new internet television delivery channels such as YouView will open up the ability for viewers to engage more with television and take advantage of 'trigger moments' to donate. Social media will also play its part as people get more involved with the causes they are donating towards.

Cloud computing will support this growth: it's scalable, secure and flexible. The commercial sector has already started to implement it, and we will soon see charities – both large and small – reaping the benefits too.